Meaning that doing so, they won’t have to host those images, and they’re stealing bandwidths from you. But you have a choice to control from being hot linked by others just to save some of your bandwidths. Or you’re simply pissed off as those original images that you’ve created by your own have simply been copied and pasted over. And they’ve even stolen the originality of your content.

To prevent from hot linking, you’ll just need to add some codes to your .htaccess, such as the following codes which I wanna prevent the four domains to hot link to my images.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?myspace\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?blogspot\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?wordpress\.com/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} ^http://(.+\.)?livejournal\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

The users will get redirected to my PHP page /images/sorrynothotlinking.php which I build using PHP function imagecreatefromjpeg() to output an image that shows the “No Hot Linking” messages. You’ll probably could make it to point to another image file with either a .gif or .jpg extension. But I’ve found somehow the redirection will keep looping as it seems to have confused the webserver. So, I’ve then made a PHP script to do so.

By the way, in the occasion you wanna block all others from hot linking to your images except with few domains that you wanna allow, (lets say mysite1.com and mysite2.com as follows), you can add the following codes to your .htaccess

RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite1\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(.+\.)?mysite2\.com/ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteRule .*\.(jpg|gif|bmp|png|jpeg)$ /images/sorrynothotlinking.php [L]

Please note that if you only allow a few domains to be able to hot link to your images and block all the rest, will prevent those images to show up on email clients as well. As you’ll have lots of readers to subscribe your blog feed via FeedBlitz which delivers blog feed via emails. When they open up the feeds on the email clients they’ll see the “No Hot Link” images on each post and this is ugly.

The best way is to use method 1, just to block those sites or blogs or those you dislike which you’ve discovered that they hot link to you.

The x here could be 2,3,4 … and even 7, 8, 9. Imagine, if Liewcf is making more than $5,000 USD a month, it’ll be about more than RM15K a month, which is much more than an average guy working in the IT industry in Malaysia.

A programmer works in the IT company could get the salary from RM1,500 to RM7,000 or more, depending on which state you’re in. Those who work in the Kuala Lumpur MSC zone will most probably get in the range of RM3K to RM8K if you’re just a programmer.

If you’re unfortunate, happened to get attached to a China-man styled company, you’re getting worse and less wages. Due to the poor salary scales in Malaysia, and the weakness of the Malaysian government law, to protect intellectual property, many and more IT savvy guys or techies have switched from being an IT technical guy (such as a programmer, software developer) to a pro blogger. Liewcf is one of them. And the other that I know is hongkiat.

If I’m not mistaken Liewcf used to be a programmer and he quit in 2005 Sept 09 to become a fulltime pro blogger. The reasons behind are he wants more free time, which he dedicates more times to sleep, watching TV, reading newspaper and gaining weight.

Quiting a daytime job and becoming a pro-blogger might be the dream of many IT-savvy guys. This is due to the IT world might NOT be paying that well. Some more, you will always have to see the face of the boss while working as a white collar in the office. Perhaps, there are many reasons that will put you off, feeling non-spiritual working at today’s IT office in Malaysia.

In many smaller towns, programmers might be only used by business men to develop some software and they’re getting little pay, and eventually the business men own all the software as their own property and sell it to make more money. This definitely demotivates many IT savvy guys from continuously contributing to the IT world. And many hope to quit their day time job and cling on blogging. This really sounds very unhealthy to the IT industry in Malaysia. As, eventually the country will lose out many innovative and tech savvy guys, and we’ll fail to develop innovative and competitive products to show the world, to achieve the Mission 2020.

To opt blogging and quit your daytime job is definitely not an overnight dream or change. It takes many years to build up your blog as popular as Liewcf’s. I’m also a guy in the IT, and I’m also making money from blogging, which I make $X,000 a month from my other blog (Not this one, this is not meant for making money yet). But my x shall be much less than the x earned by Mr Liew.

But I’m not a fulltime blogger. I’m still in the IT world, leading a group of programmers and involved in some cool web applications development. Perhaps, if I become a fulltime, I’ll be able to make more x dollars from blogging. But for the time being, I only consider blogging is my side income or as a hobby of learning more from the techie world. I enjoy blogging but I love my job too. Maybe, I’m the lucky one, since I’m also the business owner and a director of the company, I get more flexible time. And I can manage my time well at night by posting 3-5 posts a day.

Frankly, it seems pretty hard to get good programmers or software developers these days. It’s most probably most of them have become fulltime bloggers or they’ve opened up their own business.

Update: Perhaps, the IT industry shall look into giving a much more secure and cozy environment for the programmers and techies to work. It’s best to be an environment secure in the sense of financial and time. And giving less stress to those techies. It’ll be best they can continuously contribute to the IT industry as well as making some bucks out of blogging as long as they can manage their own time. Increase your TQ (Time Quotient) is a must to get richer these days.

Various news sources are saying that the storm has high tendency to become a hurricane. Of course, many people in the States, are in the wait and see actions. In the mean time, it’s still uncertain what the storm will turn out to be. It’s best while you’re sitting at home and extremely worried what you could do next, then you make use of the Google Maps to track where the storm is heading to.

Other than the Google Maps-powered Hurricane tracking tool, there are couple of other tools that are also great to help learn more about the storm. The site hurricane.terrapin.com also provides lots of information. And it’s got the StormTrack system received information from the National Weather Service.

If you prefer to zoom from top down to the earth to trace the storm movement, National Hurricane Center also provides tons of satellite photos, forecasts and other information to help residents and business owners, so you’ll know what to do before it’s too late.

The recent report shows that the Tropical Storm Fay is bringing super heavy rain and 60 mph (97 kph) winds hitting the Florida mainland of United States. Miami-based U.S. National Hurricane Center also reports that it would likely reach a near hurricane force that could reach a top sustained wind of 74 mph (119 kph) — when it strikes the west coast of Florida early on Tuesday, somewhere near the beach resort area of Naples.

CNN also reports that a hurricane warning was issued, Monday for southwestern Florida, from Flamingo to Anna Maria Island. The warning means hurricane conditions are expected within 24 hours.

Currently, the path of the storm is far away from U.S. oil and gas rigs in the Gulf of Mexico. But those energy companies are getting worried, pulling their workers from offshore platforms.

Here you go, attached is the Google Map which allows you to trace the path of Tropical Storm Fay.

source 1,source 2, source 3

The RushmoreDrive search engine is claimed to be a black Google, which also claims Google is too white. As white or brighter color is deemed to consume more energy on a CRT monitor? No, it’s about the black men don’t like to use Google, which is meant more for the white and Google has been accused of returning results that alienate the rest of the population.

RushmoreDrive was launched by Johnny C. Taylor, in April, which is made to return search results that target more to the black community. Yeah, RushmoreDrive has made it more relevant search results to black. Such as the black people search for “Whitney” mostly mean they’re looking for Whitney Houston. But if you perform the search for “Whitney” you’ll get the first result on Google is Whitney Museum of Art, followed by Whitney Bank, and then only either the 3rd or the 4th is Whitney Houston.

But RushmoreDrive does it differently, it returns search results favorable to the black. Searching for Whitney definitely returns “Whitney Houston” first and always return stuff that Black people like! (The search for “Whitney” on RushmoreDrive is promoted to the first position on the first page of search results, whereas Whitney Museum of Art and Whitney Bank have been demoted to 2nd and 3rd respectively.) The RushMoreDrive search engine is named after the North Carolina street where its offices are. Great for the black!

via [latimesblogs]

We want better search results? I personally feel that Google does the best, with its very simple user interface, and search results are highly relevant, although many claim that Google’s search results are now floated with blog posts. Google determines the position of a search result by the website’s or the page’s pagerank. And pagerank is determined by how many incoming links to a website or web page. Yeah, it’s reasonable that the search result shows higher position if that website or web page has more incoming links, which stand for the genuity, originality and higher relevancy of what the user searches. But due to recent years, many people are making spamming links, some spamming pages can be made with high pagerank too, before it’s been detected by the big G.

Well, we’re not to talk about how big G does it. It’s done pretty nice since its launch back in 1998. We’re here to talk about the Cuil (pronounced as “cool”), a search engine that was launched by an ex Google scientist. Yeah, this search engine seems to have their own search index database. As when I perform a search, it shows very low similarity to search results provided by any of the big three. Meaning it shouldn’t be a wrapper of any of these three. The search results are organized in a 3-column manner, which the left most two columns are showing the returned search results. And the right column occasionally lists some relevant categories for the user to explore more.

The “Explore By Category” shows some funs, when you have your mouse over, which will expand the categories for you to further click each of them. Personally, I don’t like the way it organizes its search results. According to CNET, Cuil had a bad launch, which was complained with glitches and weird, incomplete, missing search results. According to CNET’s talk with Cuil VP of communications Vince Sollitto about the launch issues. CEO Tom Costello was “busy putting out fires,” Sollitto said.

Sollitto said there were two issues affecting Cuil search quality currently. First, he said, “We are trying to give people different results.” Cuil is pitched as an alternative to traditional search engines, and users should not expect the results to be the same.

Personally, I’m same with the rest, I ain’t like how it organizes the search results. Yeah, I know, we properly shall appreciate that they’ve been striving to provide better and different search results. Look, when I searched for “USB Magic Jack“, and I clicked on the one of the returned results, it showed me PAGE NOT FOUND! It sucks. Although PAGE NOT FOUND is not to blame Curl, it shall be the responsibility of the website itself. But I think, Curl somehow must have intelligence built-in to detect and not to show a search result that points to a page which returns the code 404!

More bad talk about Cuil is found here. It says Cuil sucks!

The sorting of content also depends on the local relevancy. It offers advanced search and setting of your own preference such as how many search result to return in a page, enable safe search, language selection and open search result in a new browser window. These are some of the common preferences that have been offered by the big search engines such as Google.

Each search result gives a preview option, when clicked, it’ll load the page in a small iframe. Somehow, I find this unnecessary.

Talking about the option that allows user to open a new browser window when the search result is clicked, AskAlexia.com seems to have no option for this. They do it differently, which each search result will open to a new browser window by default. But almost all other search engines will open on the same windows, unless you’ve chosen to open in a new browser window. But AskAlexia ajax search does it by default opening search result in a new browser window and gives no option for that. I think they shall make some improvements for this. But they’re forgiven since they’re still in the BETA version.

Check out the New Zealand search engine, here the Searchii, Found via AskAlexia blog search

It all depends how you market your search engine. The Internet advertising is kinda like endless market, which has more rooms for expansion. Scour is another search engine which is also a wrapper, and it’s built with its wrappers over the big three, which the searched results are aggregated from the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN, just in case you ain’t know).

Furthermore search result allows members to comment. So you can judge on a search result more precisely from those comments. The Scour also offers a money making opportunity to the public who use the Scour search engine. Their money model is as follows:

* You get 1 point when you make a search on Scour,
* Every comment you write about the particular search result gives you 2 points,
* You can invite a friend to Scour, and earn points for these invites,
* 25% of points that are made by the people invited by you are also added to your account.
* Also the installation of Scour toolbar gives you points.

Once you’ve accumulated 6,500 points, you can then redeem for a 25$ Visa Gift Card. So it all depends how hard you work searching on Scour. If you could search Scour for 6,500 times a day, meaning that you’d get a $25 worth Visa Gift card everyday. Toolbars for IE and Firefox are available and they’ll have a version with widgets.

While searching it seems to work like AJAX manner, as what Ask Alexia search engine does having a spinner being loaded. But the returned search results are having the most, three pages only. And it seems to have loaded all these three pages at once. As navigating to the next page loads extremely fast! About AskAlexia, their homepage is a girly gadget blog, but today, I’ve spotted a search bar for pointing to the web, image, video, news, music and blog searches is available on the top of the homepage. Check it out at Ask Alexia

via [technospot]

From my understanding the Tybit search engine shouldn’t have their own indexes database, which they work like others which is only a wrapper of the big three (Google, Yahoo and MSN). As when you perform a search on tybit, it shows very close searched results to the big three. Nowadays, even the three are getting closer to each other.

One thing is good is Tybit offers search affiliates, which you can sign up at Tybit website to become an affiliate, if you’ve got a website. You’ll need to paste really simple code on your website to turn it into your own Tybit-powered search engine. Whenever people search on your search engine, and they click on those adverts listed at the right-hand side (similar to Google adwords), you’ll then get paid.

I’ve learned about Tybit as I read it from the magazine World Opportunity. It says that Tybit can let you earn about $140 a day if you have a website that has about 1,000 unique visitors per day. And if you have more of course, you’ll make more than that. Imagine, $140 per day, you’ll get about $140 x 30 = $4,200 per month.

Besides Tybit, if you’re looking for another interesting search engine, Ask Alexia might be worth looking. It’s an ajax-based search engine, that shows no page reload or refresh when you perform your searches on it. It offers 6 searches for the time being, which are, web, image, video, news, music and blog. And having various controls for different searches, such as filtering for different formats of documents, image types, video types, and music searches by song title, artist and album name etc. But it’s somehow still under BETA version. It looks like it’s also a wrapper of Yahoo and the blog search could be a wrapper of Technorati as it offers filtering for authority.

She is a so-called “elite suppressor,” and studies of her immune cells have begun to offer clues to how her body does it, the team at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore said.

“This is the best evidence to date that elite suppressors can have fully pathogenic virus,” said Dr. Joel Blankson, who led the study.

“The feeling was initially that they had defective virus,” Blankson added in a telephone interview.

But the couple has been monogamous for at least 17 years, Blankson said, and tests show they are infected with the same strain of virus. What is different is the immune system of the wife, who cannot be named for privacy reasons.

“That’s a good sign in terms of developing a therapeutic vaccine,” Blankson said. Such a vaccine would not

source [yahoo news], Pic source